Seminar 1: comments and responses

16 December 2009, by Richard

Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s initial seminar in Manchester: it was a fascinating and challenging day. Particular thanks to Tom Schuller and John Furlong for taking the time to share their perspectives on educational change and the contexts in which the educational research community is situated.

In the afternoon session, our core questions were how do we help the education system get better at thinking about the future? and what is the role of the education research community in achieving that? These were the central issues of the day: our final session, though, asked a few more practical questions:

• What is clearer for you after today?
• What might help us to draw upon disciplinary expertise and insight more effectively in the seminar series?
• Who else ought to have been there?

Of course, comprehensive answers to all these questions aren’t going to be forthcoming immediately. But, in the meantime, if anyone has any immediate responses to these questions, or any comments on the general themes that emerged from the day, it would be wonderful to capture them here, using the comment form below. We’ll use these to sustain our conversation between now and the next event in the series.

Looking forward very much to hearing your thoughts: thanks again for your time and contributions yesterday. See you in March!

Categories: events

Seminar 1: speaker abstracts

8 December 2009, by Richard

We’re looking forward to the first seminar in the series next week. Below are outlines of the two papers being presented during the day.

Perspectives on methods for futures research in education
Professor Tom Schuller

I shall draw on three rather different sources of personal experience:

• a general interest in time as a social phenomenon
• international policy analysis at OECD
• the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning

I shall use these to offer some perspectives on the claims and utility of futures thinking. A particularly hard question which follows from this is how we distinguish ‘good’ or ‘successful’ futures thinking from their obverse.

Research and the Future of Education; higher education’s contribution
Professor John Furlong

This paper will explore some of the challenges facing those in higher education – and particularly university schools and departments of education – if they are to make a serious contribution to theorising and thinking about the future of education. It will address, in different degrees, three questions: what is current contribution of universities to such debates; why is that current contribution so restricted; what sorts of contributions can and should universities make in the future and how can that be achieved?

Categories: abstracts, events